When horror is horrifyingly bad

A classic horror film’s sequel deeply disappoints priest Yaroslav Walker, missing opportunities to address psychological and spiritual power.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man and a women stand looking in the same direction with concerned faces.

Ellen Burstyn and Leslie Odom Jr are concerned about the reviews.

Universal Pictures.

That’s it. I have nothing more to say about the film in this review - The Exorcist: Believer. If you want a proper, knowledgeable, definitive derogatory diatribe against this dreadful waste of celluloid, may I suggest you watch this review by Mark Kermode. The good Doctor loves the original Exorcist more than any other reviewer I’m aware of and is the expert witness you need if you want to understand the absolute abomination this ‘film’ is (and, more importantly, is not!). I don’t have the energy. However, I do have the Church’s authority to speak on matters of faith and doctrine, so instead of my usual theology-smuggle at the end of a review, can we just dive right into it?

SPOILERS AHEAD – trust me, it doesn’t matter…

You can’t comment on an exorcism film without reference to the original – The Exorcist. Believer is David Gordon Green making a something of a sequel to the original; this went well with his first Halloween film, and then turned horrifyingly, stupidly bad with the second and third outings (and such treatment is promised for the Exorcist franchise). The Exorcist is a club sandwich of thematic wonder. William Peter Blatty was both a tremendously talented writer and also a thoughtful, intelligent, and committed Roman Catholic. When he wrote the novel of The Exorcist, he created a popular (slightly bloated) theological masterpiece. Adapting the script for William Friedkin to direct, he took the core themes and trimmed all the fat. The result is gorgeously lean, muscular, agile film that moves at a clip and doesn’t allow you a moment to forget the searing questions of faith, and doubt, and family, and failure, and sin.

Believer raises no such questions. If it has any sort of theme or message it seems to be this. The demonic is there not to sow random chaos, horror, pain and destruction (a good understanding of ‘evil’ as ‘nothing’, very much in keeping with a conception of evil formalised in Western theology by St Augustine almost a few millennia ago, which Blatty presents with perfection). It is there to offer people an ironic monkey’s-paw-esque bargain to reveal their own weakness and hypocrisy…yeh? Believer isn’t just terrible film, and not just a terrible sequel to a remarkable film; it is the lazy desecration of a cinematic theological legacy.

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’.

To name the overarching source of my incandescence, it is this question: What is the demonic doing in this film? What is it achieving? The original Exorcist is clear – Fr Merrin (the eponymous exorcist) explains that the possession of a child is intended as random, purely nihilistic, awful chaos that grinds down the resolve of righteous. It has no point, no substance – it is genuine ‘evil’, nothingness collapsing in on itself. In Believer the demon seems to be wanting to make a social commentary on parenting…maybe? At the start of the film the voodoo-blessed mother is caught in a building collapse after a Haitian earthquake, and as she lies dying in a makeshift hospital the father is presented with a terrible choice: the surgeon can only save one or the other, mother or baby. SPOILER – he may have a daughter, but he didn’t choose her. There’s another girl who is something of a free spirit with parents who are very light touch. One father didn’t want his daughter, the other doesn’t seem to be too bothered about his daughter having structure…you know? Parents, children, the sins of the father…you know?

The great climax has the demon(s) presenting the assembled non-exorcists with a choice. Fathers – choose your daughter and she’ll live, first come, first served. One father recognises the immorality, the pointless and annihilating ‘evil’, of letting a girl die, the other doesn’t. He’s been pretty much a non-entity throughout the film, has no real understanding of what is going on, is about as psychologically traumatised as it is possible to be, and is presented with the opportunity to save his daughter…of course he makes the wrong choice…because this is a ‘clever film’…The demon reveals the girl who was chosen will die. TWIST. Didn’t see that coming – admittedly this film is so stupid I didn’t see anything coming. Why? Why let one girl live? Why is this demon – this figure of total and destructive evil – teaching the people a lesson about self-sacrifice and never being willing to sacrifice an innocent? Is the demon making an important point? WHAT IS GOING ON!? Well, the mistakes of Heretic are being repeated, but this is a point for the cognoscenti…

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’; it ends with a broken man finding his faith and his redemption in a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice (Fr Karras – the junior exorcist – takes the demon into himself and commits suicide). There is, in this final act, a moving and absolute statement on the indomitability of creation (and humanity as the pinnacle of creation) as that which God has willed into being and continues to will ‘to be’. We are here! We are loved! We are to be redeemed! We cannot be seduced by the lie that decay and dissolution and destruction and nothingness is our ultimate destiny. Believer has people stumbling by accident to a conclusion that says nothing about God, or the devil, or heaven, or hell, or faith, or doubt, or family, OR GOOD AND EVIL, or anything serious.

I despise this film. I pray to God the other two films in the proposed trilogy do not get made. They probably will…maybe that’s not the end of the world. Maybe the inevitable sequels will, in the very fact of their being filmed and released, be a better exposition of the reality of banal and destructive evil, which seeks to find the beauty of ‘what is’ and tarnish it, than their actual stories. Maybe…

Star rating? At the sight of this film the stars themselves hid…

Article

Advent

Attention

Christmas culture

Culture

21 December 2024

4 min read

The Visitation and Wicked taught me about welcoming

See, behold, recognise, welcome.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A Renaissance painting of Elizabeth greeting the Virgin birth show two woman reaching out to hug, while others look on.

Pontormo's Visitation, 1528.

Pontormo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It is a gift when we encounter something — a walk, conversation, work of art — that gives insight into a story we’ve long held dear (or often, long wrestled with). Last week in a cinema in Limerick, a moment in the film Wicked did just that.

For the last year or so, I have been thinking about an event in the Gospel of Luke traditionally called the Visitation. This is the moment when Mary, the mother of Jesus, after realizing she was pregnant, traveled from Galilee to the hill country in Judea where her cousin Elizabeth lived. Elizabeth was also pregnant with a son, who would be John the Baptist. When these two women see each other, the word ‘greet’ is used several times in quick succession: a moving ethos occurs of this very human act of greeting — seeing, beholding, recognizing, welcoming. In a moment of abundant overflow, they vocalize praises from the deep heart; Elizabeth calls out to Mary, and Mary responds back.

This Visitation moment has captured hearts and minds through the centuries. One of my favourite examples is the sixteenth-century painting by Pontormo, and a 1995 work of video art by Bill Viola, which brings this painting to life. In both of these pieces, we see the kind of beholding that the Visitation involves. We see warmth enveloping warmth. We see the brightness of recognition. We see tender enfolding and embrace. We see welcome. I have come to believe that this greeting we humans long for.

They see, greet, and welcome each other in an overflowing moment of beholding and recognition.

So, last week in the cinema. I am a big fan of Wicked and from the start of the film was thrilled with the cinematic version. But at the start of the scene when Elphaba (played luminously by Cynthia Erivo) walks onto the dance floor of the local disco, the film shifted. It was as if the whole movie slowed into something different: a kind of halved-open, shadow-light play of the heart.

Elphaba, realizing how the hat she had put on was all too wrong, instead of running, leans into this electrifying space of vulnerability and exposure. As silence pounds, she lifts her hand to her forehead and bizarrely wriggles her fingers. Steps of a strange dance follow. Others look on, mortified and disgusted. Galinda (played incandescently by Ariana Grande) watches, her face stamped with distress. She had given Elphaba that hat, as a trick. Then, she decides and acts: she joins Elphaba on the dance floor and tries to follow the steps.

Narratively, the moment is the hinge to their friendship, securing them together in scenes that follow. But, before the narrative arc moves on, it dips down and stretches out. The lens rests closely on the two faces, separately, and we are drawn into the slopes of Elphaba’s face and the shine in Galinda’s eyes — and in the way they are drawn into the reality of the other’s face.

They see, greet, and welcome each other in an overflowing moment of beholding and recognition. Such seeing shapes both. Such seeing brings them to be part of something whole. Sitting there in the cinema, my breath caught: I felt I was watching an iteration of that moment in Judea’s hill country from long ago, when two women also greeted each other.

Serendipitously, because we are in Year C of the Anglican Church’s Lectionary — as in, we are in the third set of scheduled readings from the Bible — this year’s fourth Sunday of Advent reading presents the Visitation. This Sunday, as we tip from Advent season (a stretch of time marked by waiting) into Christmas (celebrating the birth of Christ and God-made-flesh, God-with-us), the long-suffering waiting of Advent funnels through this stunning moment of recognition. As the nativity narrative unfolds around them, Mary and Elizabeth enact this mutual, abundant recognition, and we have the chance to behold them beholding each other, so that our own sensibilities for seeing and being seen are given a glimpse into how this kind of wholeness-making can happen.

I think too their praises give us an even deeper glimpse into what makes this wholeness real. They rejoice in the God who comes to us, and is-with-us, who heals us so that we too can participate in this kind of greeting — with God, with ourselves, and with one another. And that healing is so needed; as Mary’s words ring out unfettered, she praises God for empowering the lowly, those caught in dreadful structures of power. The ethos of deep greeting can happen no other way.

A dear thing happened right after that Wicked dance moment. In the dark theatre, I looked over to my friend, three kids between us, with a smile — and without missing a beat, she raised her hand to her forehead and wriggled her fingers. Her daughter and I followed suit. We were all wriggling our hands at our foreheads, communicating a new, just-seen signal for the abiding welcome that friendship means.

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